Health and healing in eighteenth-century Germany

Although the physicians and surgeons of eighteenth-century Germany have attracted previous scholarly inquiry, little is known about their day-to-day activities - and even less about the ways in which those activities fit into the economic, political, and social structures of the time.

Opening with a discussion of the interplay of state and society in the independent German state of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel, Lindemann explains how medical policy was "made" at all levels. She describes the striking array of healers active in eighteenth-century society: from physicians to all those consulted in medical situations - friends and neighbors, executioners and barber-surgeons, bathmasters, midwives, and apothecaries.

Lindemann also examines the process of becoming a patient and explores the effects of the social, economic, political, and cultural milieux on how medicine was practiced in the everyday world of the village, the neighborhood, and the town.